by Jay Winik
“The streets,” one Gestapo officer observed, “look like a battlefield.” Even the famed zoo was left in ruins.
The bombing became an ongoing torture for those on the ground, a maddening chorus of nighttime explosions matched only by the crackling of the fires. All the while, a strange “rain” began to fall, glinting bits of aluminum foil drifting slowly to the streets from the sky. The Allies were dropping it to confuse German radar. Even the shelters did not always provide a safe haven. One horrified young resident watched as the ceiling of his bunker began to shake, swaying and tottering in slow motion for some minutes, until it collapsed. He was one of only a few people brought out alive from the ruins.
The explosions continued to thunder across the city, often in series of eights, and the Berliners came to realize that each plane’s bomb cradle carried eight explosives. And as the Allied planes turned westward for the journey home, their crews could see the fiery red glow from Berlin for a full twenty minutes in the sky.
When the sun rose the next morning, the sights were devastating. People could hardly breathe, because of the clouds of smoke rising from still-burning houses. Terrified residents stumbled through the streets, tripping over fragments and debris. “Everywhere,” one diarist grimly noted, “glass fragments crunched beneath our feet.” The wreckage of hundreds of thousands of lives was now revealed in vivid details: in smashed chandeliers, in the remains of vases and crystal bowls, and in piles of crushed porcelain. Meanwhile, the fires continued to burn, and the sky itself had turned a dirty yellow. Surveying the smoking remains, Goebbels said, “You see nothing but remnants of walls and debris.”
By the week’s end, life in Berlin had become a hell on earth; nearly half a million Germans had been left homeless, and some ten thousand were injured. The dead were laid out in school halls and gymnasiums, awaiting identification. Almost four thousand had been killed in that one week alone. Still, Hitler’s staunchest patriots were undeterred; throughout their city, the Nazi faithful planted little flags and swastikas on top of the rubble.
But for the millions of subjects in an occupied Europe now tormented by the ruthless Nazi regime, the Allied bombing of the Reich capital gave them a chance to hope. Among ordinary Germans, it did something else: it profoundly shattered their faith in the ability of the state to protect them. Hermann Göring, Hitler’s designated successor and at one time the Luftwaffe commander, had pledged that not a single enemy bomb would drop on the sacred soil of the German capital; but as an American general had boasted, “In sixty seconds, the cumulative effort of 100 years can be destroyed.” With a sense of foreboding, one Berliner summed up the mood of the city after the relentless air offensive: “We are,” he muttered, “at the mercy of our enemies.”
As the Allied planes returned to the relative safety of British airspace, this, of course, was precisely what Roosevelt and Churchill had in mind.
YET THERE WERE STILL those whom the bombers had not yet reached, however desperately they awaited and pleaded for their arrival. Longingly they looked up into the skies and wondered: when will the Allies come?
FAR AWAY FROM THE battlefields and from the diplomacy at Cairo, just one day before the Allies launched their air assault on Berlin, more than five hundred Dutch citizens shuffled past a small grove of now barren fruit trees, and made their way down a ramp toward a room encased by earthen mounds. A few were sobbing, but mostly there were only the sounds of low murmurs, of feet wearily plodding forward. Small children were hoisted on hips or gripped by the hand of an older child. The aged and the infirm moved slowly, their bones already bent more closely toward the ground. As they walked, nearly 165 Poles joined them. Most were scared, but exactly of what, few were sure.
The room that awaited them was uncommonly cold. The heavy doors slammed shut behind them.
On the scrubbed walls were signs of faint scratches.
A young Polish woman began to shout: “The German nation shall . . . dearly pay for our blood. Down with savagery in the guise of Hitler’s Germany!” Almost simultaneously, the Poles knelt on the ground, clasped their hands, and began to pray. Then came another sound, of singing. It was Hatikvah (“The Hope”), the informal national anthem of the Jewish people—“Our hope is not yet lost / to be a free people in our land,” sung by the Dutch. Then the Poles joined them, matching chorus with chorus. “Poland is not yet lost,” they sang, the words of their own national anthem. Hundreds of voices swelled inside that single room: “Then our hope . . . will not be lost.”
Just beyond the walls, there was the rumble of vans arriving. They were marked with the symbol of the Red Cross, the universal sign of help for the sick, the injured, the displaced, and the dispossessed. But it was not to be. As children shivered—there were 166 of them now locked in the room, stripped naked—the singing reached a crescendo of emotion. Standing on the hard ground outside, guards hurriedly began unloading the tins from the Red Cross vans. At the same time, SS men calmly flipped open a peephole.
There was a clink on the roof above.
The gas started to flow downward, and the screaming began.
THIS WAS THE WESTERN world at war in 1943 on the precipice of 1944, the year that would change history. It was the world that Franklin Roosevelt and the Allies were trying to save when the three great powers—America, the Soviet Union, and Britain—were about to gather for the first time over three and a half tense days at Tehran.
After the success of D-Day, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Supreme Allied Commander, observes air activity from the deck of a warship on his way to Normandy from southern England on June 7, 1944. President Roosevelt chose him to command Operation Overlord because he was “a natural leader.”
Part One
Spring 1944 Everything All at Once
1
Tehran
FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT HAD NEVER wanted to travel to Tehran. Throughout the fall of 1943, the president used his vaunted charm and charisma to push for the three Allied leaders—himself, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin—to meet almost anywhere else. The conference, their first ever, had been a year in the making, and now, before it even commenced, it seemed on the brink of failure over the thorny question of where it would take place.
Dispatched on a visit to Moscow, Secretary of State Cordell Hull had proposed the Iraqi port city of Basra, to which Roosevelt could easily travel by ship. Roosevelt himself suggested Cairo, Baghdad, or Asmara, Italy’s former Eritrean capital on Africa’s east coast; all these were locations, the president pointed out, where he could easily remain in constant contact with Washington, D.C. as was necessary for his wartime stewardship. But the Soviet leader, Joseph Stalin, was unmoved. He countered that as commander of the Soviet armed forces he could not be out of contact with his deputies in Moscow. He maintained that Tehran, at the foot of the Elburz Mountains, had telegraph and telephone links with Moscow. “My colleagues insist on Teheran,” he bluntly cabled to Roosevelt in reply, adding that he would however accept a late-November date for the meeting and that he also agreed with the American and British decision to exclude all members of the press.
Roosevelt, still hoping to sway the man he referred to as “Uncle Joe,” cabled again about Basra, saying, “I am begging you to remember that I also have a great obligation to the American government and to maintain the full American war effort.” The answer from Moscow was brief and direct: no. Stalin was adamant, and he now hinted that he might back out of the entire arrangement for a tripartite conference. Not until Roosevelt was preparing to set sail across the Atlantic en route to the Mediterranean did Stalin, having gotten his way on Tehran, finally acquiesce. Roosevelt promptly cabled to Winston Churchill, “I have just heard that Uncle J will come to Teheran. . . . I was in some doubt as to whether he would go through with his former offer . . . but I think that now there is no question that you and I can meet him.”
So it was that at the Cairo West Airport a little past 6:30 a.m. on Saturday, November 27, Roosevelt boarded the Sacred
Cow, a gleaming silver Douglas C54 Skymaster that could carry forty-nine passengers and a three-man crew, for the final leg of his momentous journey; in total, he would travel 17,442 miles, crossing and recrossing nearly eight time zones. For his part, Joseph Stalin simply had to travel due south from Moscow; his round-trip would be only 3,000 miles. But all this seemed forgotten as, for the first time in over four years of war, the leaders of the three great powers were at last to meet, face-to-face, to establish policies designed to bring the carnage to a close. This would be the most important conference of the conflict. As Churchill later wrote, “The difficulties of the American Constitution, Roosevelt’s health, and Stalin’s obduracy . . . were all swept away by the inexorable need of a triple meeting and the failure of every other alternative but a flight to Tehran. So we sailed off into the air from Cairo at the crack of dawn.”
It is difficult, in retrospect, to appreciate the magnitude of this trip, or even how bold it was. The wheelchair-bound president of the United States was flying across the Middle East in wartime, unaccompanied by military aircraft and not even in his own plane. The first official presidential airplane, nicknamed Guess Where II, was nothing more than a reconfigured B24 bomber, designated a C87A Liberator; and in any case Roosevelt never used it. After another C87A crashed and the design was found to have an alarming risk of fire—which Roosevelt dreaded—Guess Where II was quietly pulled from the presidential service. Eleanor Roosevelt took the plane on a goodwill tour of Latin America, and the senior White House staff flew on it, but not the president.
Furthermore, Franklin Roosevelt hated to fly.
The paraplegic president preferred almost any mode of travel on solid ground, but even here, he had qualms: for one thing, he could not bear to ride in a train that traveled faster than thirty miles an hour. His presidential train made him feel especially secure: it had a special suspension to support his lower body, its walls were armored, and the glass was bulletproof. An accomplished sailor, he also felt comfortable on the water, where he could master the pitch and swell of the waves. But flying was an entirely different matter, and one not without considerable personal risk. Even simple turbulence was problematic because the president “could never brace himself against the bumps and jolts with his legs as we could,” recalled Mike Reilly, head of Roosevelt’s Secret Service detail. And Roosevelt knew better than anyone else how he was limited by his useless legs—he would have no chance of crawling away from even a minor plane wreck.
Before the Cairo-to-Tehran flight, Roosevelt had made only two other airplane journeys. One was a 1932 flight to Chicago to accept the Democratic nomination for the presidency, during which all the passengers except Roosevelt and his grown son, Elliott, succumbed to airsickness. Before takeoff, mechanics had helpfully removed one of the seats to provide more room, but none of the passengers had seatbelts, so they had to cling to the upholstered arms of their aluminum chairs or risk being tossed about when the plane hit turbulence. The interior noise from the engines was deafening, and the plane’s top speed was just over a hundred miles per hour. Two military aircraft providing an escort as well as a chartered plane carrying reporters turned back in the face of thunderstorms and heavy headwinds, while the plane carrying Roosevelt soldiered on. Then, in January 1943, Roosevelt again took to the skies to meet with Churchill in Casablanca. His party of eight departed from Miami in a forty-passenger plane, the Dixie Clipper, which leapfrogged south across the Caribbean to Brazil and then spent nineteen hours making the 2,500-mile Atlantic crossing from South America to West Africa. The clipper planes, although they had spacious cabins and sleeping quarters including a double bed for Roosevelt, were unpressurized, and at the higher altitudes the president would turn pale, sometimes needing to inhale supplemental oxygen. Indeed, the flight to Casablanca, the first airplane trip by an incumbent president, did not make him any more of a convert to flying. As Roosevelt wrote to his wife, Eleanor, who was by contrast an enthusiastic flier, “You can have your clouds. They bore me.”
But here he was, only ten months later, aloft again, this time in the Sacred Cow.
The 1,300-mile journey that morning took Roosevelt east, roaring through the brilliant sunshine across the Suez Canal and the vast expanses of the Sinai desert; the pilot then dipped down to circle low over the holy cities of Jerusalem and Bethlehem, glistening in the morning’s rays. Next, the plane soared over chains of ancient wadis, followed by the hallowed ground of Masada, the rugged fortress in the Judaean hills where a small band of Jews chose death rather than slavery, outlasting an entire Roman legion for nearly three months in the spring of A.D. 73. When the plane reached Baghdad, it turned northeast, where the pilot raced along the Abadan–Tehran highway, guiding the plane through a tricky series of jagged mountain passes. There was no alternative: the plane needed to stay below six thousand feet to keep the oxygen level stable for the president. As Roosevelt peered out the plane’s window, the land below was a chain of mountains rising from a rocky desert, resembling a brown, faded moonscape. It was isolated and empty, except for the exhilarating sight of trains and truck convoys loaded with American-made war matériel, all headed north to the eastern front.
SIX AND A HALF hours later, the president’s plane landed at 3 p.m. at a Red Army airfield in Tehran. Stalin was already waiting. He had arrived in the city twenty-four hours before the British and the Americans and was ensconced at the Russian legation, where he had personally overseen the bugging of a suite of private rooms where the American president would eventually stay.
“Shabby” was how Elliott Roosevelt, the president’s son, described Tehran in late November 1943. The Iranian capital was almost literally a cesspool. Except at the American, Soviet, and British legations, running water was practically nonexistent. Residents and visitors alike scooped their drinking water from a stream that ran along the street gutter, the same stream that also served as the city’s sewage disposal system. Downtown, much of the public drinking water was contaminated with refuse and offal; each sip risked typhus or dysentery, and outbreaks of typhoid fever were common. The city was unappealing in other ways as well. It was occupied by Allied forces, and even the most basic goods were in short supply; a year’s salary might be spent on a sack of flour.
Nor was the city a glamorous place, able to recall a storied past. Among world capitals, Tehran was—surprisingly—almost as much of a newcomer as the young Washington, D.C., had been at its inception, when it was little more than a charming semirural landscape derided as a city of “magnificent distances.” By contrast, in 1800, Tehran’s total population of about twenty thousand had lived inside twenty-foot-high mud walls, which were bounded by a forty-foot-wide moat as deep as thirty feet.
The entire city itself was accessible by a total of four gates. By 1943, the gates had been pulled down, and a newer city had sprung up beyond the original walls. Gone were many of the quaint old houses that had faced an intricate series of elaborate courtyards and fabled Persian gardens; gone were the donkey carts laden with dates and figs and honey and henna en route to the bustling markets. Instead, newer homes looked outward toward wide main streets designed to accommodate automobiles, trucks, and the occasional horse or wheelbarrow. And beyond its modern boulevards, the city emptied out into a vast, barren space with little more than grazing land and oil fields.
The drive from the airfield to downtown Tehran was far from tranquil. The route took the leaders and the accompanying aides through long stretches of curious onlookers and many miles of unprotected road. Before arriving forty-five minutes after the Americans, Winston Churchill, like Roosevelt before him, had endured a potentially deadly journey not unlike that of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914 through the streets of Sarajevo. Churchill’s daughter, Sarah, who was with him, thought the drive “spine-chilling.” The roads were rough, the crowds were ubiquitous, and there was only the barest security. Churchill himself drily remarked, “If it had been planned out beforehand to run the greatest risks . . . the problem could not h
ave been solved more perfectly.” The prime minister and his daughter were traveling in an unsecured car, while their British security detail followed in a closed jeep, too far behind to be of much use should trouble arise.
The route into the city was lined with magnificent white horses of the Persian cavalry—in Tehran itself, crowds four or five people deep thronged in between the gleaming animals. Meanwhile, the Allied security details constantly feared a well-lobbed grenade or a pistol shot, and for good reason: near the end of the drive, the British car came to a halt in traffic and curious Iranians swarmed the vehicle. Undaunted, Churchill kept smiling at the crowd until the traffic parted and he was under way again. Once he reached his embassy, tightly guarded by a regiment of Indian Sikhs, he brushed off any meetings and went directly to bed, with a fifth of scotch whisky and a mound of hot-water bottles.
As Churchill took to his bed, Roosevelt was spending his first and only night at the residence of the American minister on the outskirts of Tehran. The residence was about four miles from the Soviet and British embassies, which were nearly adjoining in the center of the city. The American embassy itself was a mile away, so either Roosevelt or Stalin and Churchill would have to travel through Tehran’s unpredictable streets just to meet. Whether because of paranoia, fear of assassination, or perfidy, Stalin seemed particularly unwilling to make the trip to the American residence. In fact, on the day of Roosevelt’s arrival, he turned down the president’s invitation to dinner, pleading exhaustion.